HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
eve of the First World War selected the one most
in harmony with its aspirations for greater social
equality and more political freedom. In 1905,
Henry W. Nevinson, the influential pubhcist, began
his volume on Books and Personalities with a
long essay on Heine, the sentry of the Holy Spirit,
who died at his post, fighting the good fight in the
war of liberation, and forging of laughter a weapon
far more powerful than violence for dissolving the
bonds and formulae of distress.
The legend of Heine, the modern democrat, was
carried a step further by Arthur Ransom, in the
Westminster Review of January and February,
1911. While Matthew Arnold, William Sharp, and
others had contended that all of Heine was saturated
with the progressive thought and the forward
striving of the nineteenth century. Ransom
contended that the poet's work was equally expressive
of the more advanced spirit of the early twentieth
century. Not only was Heine perennially modern
in the sense in which all great poets who had
the genuine human touch must ever be modern,
but he was also modern in a more particular sense
as a fighter for the new freedom, for the democratic
ideal, for the rights of man as man, as distinguished
from the caste or class man. Heine, the singer of
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